05 August 2008

CGS member Mary Mettler is still on the road. This is her second installment:

The trip is going great! I'm in Fremont, Indiana tonight and will get my first rain and maybe big hail, according to the forecast. My car won't like "big hail" or even "little hail" for that matter. I'll be staying with my sisters in Akron and seeing my niece and grandniece and having lunch with some high school friends over the 4th of July weekend.

Cynthia, I forgot the name of your little hometown in Iowa, so I waved at all the towns! I didn't see a lot of flood damage - just low parts of fields and runoff channels down the hills of corn.

Yesterday, I drove 20 miles along the Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois to Cordova, Illinois where my 2nd great grandparents are buried. It was a gorgeous cemetery with trees and was very well maintained. Quite a number of the graves had flowers on them. To my complete surprise, there was a potted plant beside my ancestors. I asked the maintenance man about it, and he said he found the pot very close to them and put it right beside them only 15 minutes before I arrived - pretty spooky!

This morning I ran across the Mississippi from Rock Island, IL to Davenport, Iowa and back. Can't say as I have ever run in two states in the same run! I crossed next to an island with an arsenal, where Confederate soldiers had been held during the Civil War and Germans and Italians in WWII. Yesterday, I'd been searching in the 1860's newspapers, and every day they listed the names of the Confederate soldiers who died there the day before. Quite often it was pneumonia, since blankets were a rare commodity. Then, there was a horrific small pox epidemic. We hear about Andersonville and the poor treatment of our Northern soldiers, but the winners write the history books. Thus, there is nothing about Rock Island and the poor confederates!